God Hates Divorce. Apparently, He Is Okay With Abuse

The teaching that keeps Christian women married to abusive men

For years, I thought divorce was morally wrong. This is the conditioning I learned from the Independent Fundamental Baptist world. Marriage was sacred, divorce was rebellion, and the person who left was the person who broke the covenant.

“God hates divorce” (Malachi 2:16), “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6), and “Whosoever shall put away his wife… committeth adultery” (Matthew 19:9). I had been taught that the Bible was the instruction manual for life. It had verses on how to dress, raise children, behave as a wife, handle money, respond to authority, and certainly stay married. Scripture did not simply offer wisdom. It told us what God required, and disobeying it carried consequences. So when I heard these verses about divorce, I did not hear one possible interpretation of marriage. I heard God telling me what I was not allowed to do.

I did not hear much about what happens when the marriage itself becomes harmful. I never heard a preacher stand behind the pulpit and say, “If your husband abuses you, you have to stay.” They did not need to. Abuse was softened into something else. He had “a temper.” He had “anger problems.” Maybe he was “rough around the edges.” Maybe she needed to watch how she spoke to him. Maybe they both needed marriage counseling. Maybe she needed to pray more, submit better, forgive more quickly, or wait for him to get right with God. Divorce, however, was treated as the true danger.

That is one of the things I have had to untangle in my own religious deconstruction. You do not have to explicitly tell someone to stay with an abuser if you have already constructed a theology in which leaving is spiritually worse than what is happening to them. That teaching does the work for you. If divorce is covenant-breaking but abuse is merely “a temper,” then the person filing for divorce becomes the covenant-breaker.

If abuse is treated as a marriage problem rather than the behavior of an abusive person, then both spouses become responsible for fixing it. If submission is emphasized more often than protection, accountability, justice, or the husband’s obligations, then the burden naturally falls on the person with less power. Nobody ever has to say, “Stay and be abused.” They only have to keep redefining abuse until it no longer sounds serious enough to justify leaving. So, I’ll say it. That theology keeps women in abusive marriages.

Once I began reading those verses in context, I started seeing things I had never been taught to notice. Malachi 2:16 is one of the most quoted passages in Christian discussions about divorce: “For the LORD, the God of Israel, saith that he hateth putting away…” That verse is often shortened to “God hates divorce,” but the surrounding passage is not a simple statement about divorce in the abstract. In Malachi 2:14, God confronts men who have dealt treacherously with “the wife of thy youth” and “the wife of thy covenant.” The passage centers on betrayal, covenant treachery, and violence. This raises a question they don’t want you to ask: Why was Malachi used to condemn the person leaving a destructive marriage rather than the person behaving treacherously inside one? Because it protected the men. Malachi condemned husbands for betraying their wives. But the church used it to keep wives with the men who betrayed them.

Then there is Matthew 19. Jesus says, “What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matthew 19:6). This verse was presented as though Jesus were answering every possible question about divorce for every marriage, but that was not what prompted the conversation. In Matthew 19:3, the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?” That context matters because Jesus was responding to men asking how easily they could discard their wives. He was not being asked whether a battered woman had to remain with the man beating her. Or whether coercive control violated the covenant. Nor was he being asked whether a spouse had to remain with someone who terrorized the household. Those were not the questions Jesus was answering, yet Matthew 19 became the answer to all of them. People call that taking the Bible literally. But it isn’t. Applying Jesus’ answer to questions he was never asked is an interpretation some man made.

Then comes Matthew 19:9: “Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication…” In the Independent Fundamental Baptist framework I lived in, it was reduced to one exception. Adultery equals biblical grounds for divorce. Abuse does not. Sexual infidelity can break the covenant, but being hit apparently cannot. Sleeping with someone else can destroy a marriage, while terrorizing your spouse somehow does not.

Eventually I had to ask why. Where does Jesus actually say that? He does not. The conclusion comes from treating the exception Jesus mentions in one particular conversation as an exhaustive list of every possible covenant violation. Again, that interpretation was presented to me as though it were simply what the Bible said. An interpretation that allowed a wife to leave if he cheated, but not if he hit her.

The difference between interpretation and Scripture matters to me because one defining feature of fundamentalism is the tendency to erase the space between interpretation and God. A pastor does not say, “This is how our tradition interprets this passage.” He says, “The Bible says.” As if it is law. Once I recognized that, I started noticing another contradiction. Independent Fundamental Baptist teaching places enormous importance on the marriage covenant, but a covenant cannot logically consist of only one obligation: do not leave.

Marriage contains other obligations too. Colossians 3:19 says, “Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.” Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” Those are covenant obligations, along with faithfulness, care, protection, honesty, responsibility, and the refusal to use violence or fear.

Yet in many churches, violating those obligations doesn’t carry the same theological weight as filing divorce papers. A husband can intimidate his wife for years, and people still describe the marriage as intact. He can humiliate her, control her, threaten her, and destroy her sense of safety, and people will say the marriage is struggling. But when she finally leaves, she is the one who has “broken the covenant.”

That logic is backward. The legal end of a marriage on paper and the destruction of a marriage are not always the same event. Sometimes the paperwork simply acknowledges something that happened long before anyone entered a courthouse.

Other passages also complicate the fundamentalist narrative. Psalm 11:5 says, “The LORD trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth.” Proverbs 22:3 says, “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself…” And in 1 Corinthians 7:15, Paul writes, “But if the unbelieving depart, let him depart. A brother or a sister is not under bondage in such cases…”

Christians disagree on how broadly to apply that principle. Some believe abandonment means only physically leaving. Others argue that severe, persistent abuse can constitute a kind of functional abandonment because the abusive spouse has already abandoned the essential obligations of marriage. I understand that sincere Christians disagree about this. There are traditions. There are theological arguments. But there is not one obvious sentence in Scripture that says, “If your spouse abuses you, God requires you to remain married.” Nor, “If your spouse abuses you, then you can leave.”

So, I began looking outside the religious world I was familiar with. Which was a little uncomfortable at first. But that is just part of deconstruction. Fundamentalism teaches that other religions have a compromised truth, while your belief system is the only true one that follows Scripture.

I learned that Judaism regards marriage as sacred while also recognizing divorce. Deuteronomy 24:1–4 regulates divorce rather than pretending it does not exist. Islam likewise takes marriage seriously while permitting divorce and emphasizing fairness and kindness. Qur’an 2:231 specifically warns against keeping a spouse to harm them. Buddhism generally does not treat marriage as a divine sacrament in the Christian sense, and its ethical framework emphasizes compassion, non-harm, and the reduction of suffering. Hindu traditions vary widely, but the principle of ahimsa, or nonviolence, complicates any suggestion that maintaining a marriage automatically takes precedence over harm occurring within it.

What struck me was that the Independent Fundamental Baptist assumption I had embraced wasn’t a universally obvious spiritual truth. It was one theological framework among many, and even Christianity itself contains multiple frameworks.

Some Christians permit divorce for adultery and abandonment. Some recognize severe abuse as abandonment or covenant-breaking. Some permit physical separation but prohibit remarriage. Some churches leave the decision largely to conscience, pastoral discernment (and do not get me started on this topic), and the circumstances of the individual marriage. Once you know that diversity exists, it becomes much harder to accept the statement, “The Bible is clear,” without asking what exactly is it clear on? And according to whose interpretation?

One of the biggest things I have had to unlearn is the idea that the way I was taught to interpret the Bible was the only way to interpret it. I was taught to fear breaking the marriage covenant, but I was not taught to consider all the ways that covenant might already have been broken long before anyone filed for divorce. I was taught to focus on who left. Now I find myself asking different questions. Who threatened? Who humiliated? Who kept promising to change and never did? Who was expected to keep forgiving while the other person never had to become safe?

Most importantly, why does the person who finally says, “I cannot live like this anymore,” receive more scrutiny than the person who made the marriage unbearable?

I still believe marriage can be a beautiful bond between two people, but I no longer believe it should hold like super glue no matter what it costs the people in it. Filing for divorce does not automatically tell me who destroyed the marriage. Sometimes the damage was done long before anyone left, and keeping the marriage intact does not always mean something sacred is being protected.

For me, religious deconstruction has not been about throwing away every belief I was given. It has been about asking where each one came from and whether it deserved the authority I gave it. Some came from a verse. Many came from someone’s interpretation of a verse. Some came from culture. And some survived only because no one was allowed to question them.

Looking back, I can see how much power those teachings had over the choices I thought I could make. Sometimes a marriage breaks down long before the paperwork is filed, and the person who finally leaves isn’t necessarily the one who broke it.

If you are reading this because you have lived some version of it yourself, I created a Narcissistic Abuse Recovery course to help you understand the patterns, untangle the messages that kept you stuck, and begin rebuilding trust in yourself.

Narcissistic Abuse Recovery

Originally published at https://yolikaereynolds.substack.com on October 21, 2026.